


tiger, tiger

by Rikku



Category: You Stay Here - Richard Shindell (Song)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-14
Updated: 2015-12-14
Packaged: 2018-05-06 16:34:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5424155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rikku/pseuds/Rikku
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Minutia_R commissioned me to write something in the style of Jukebox! Writing a story within the canon of a song. This is for the song <a href="http://www.richardshindell.com/index.php?page=songs&display=100">You Stay Here</a>, by Richard Shindell, and I went with several of her suggestions, and enjoyed myself.</p><p>Not especially that violent, just generally post-apocalyptic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tiger, tiger

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Minutia_R](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minutia_R/gifts).



The cold was coming on, smudgy grey flakes drifting down through the gape-open roof. Scrap gave a rare laugh at it, turning his face up so the ashen snow settled on his nose, so his eyes crossed to look at it. Brindle ran to Zhe, snow melting on her bare head, eyes bright.

“Can I go out now?” she said breathlessly, tugging at her hand. Zhe closed her fingers around the girl’s, holding hands gently, but it was her gun Brindle was really fixed on, eyes sliding down to it after a bare moment. Her face showed either greed or fear, which seldom walked apart these days. Zhe didn’t know if she kept the youngster from going outside because she didn’t think she’d survive or because she thought she’d come back different, if she came back at all. These times changed you.

Zhe shifted the strap of the rifle slung over her shoulder. It still didn’t feel like it fit her right, even with the strap chafing its groove in her shoulder. Her shirt was once-white, thin, stained with dirt from gardening before the world went to hell, and stained with blood and worse after. It was too thin for this weather, this sudden sour twist into winter, but Scrap didn’t even have proper shoes.

“No need,” said a voice like boots on gravel, from over her shoulder, and Zhe stood calm and relaxed as Left Over walked around and past her, and settled to their knees beside Brindle. The child at least didn’t need to fake calmness around Left, and grinned with toothy pride as they put a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll go. You stay here and look after your brother.” They could be siblings in truth, for all Zhe knew or could get them to say, though not from the look of them.

Brindle laughed and butted her head into Left Over’s in affection, and Scrap came over, too, stopping a shorter distance away, wary. He crossed his hands over his pot belly, shifted his rag-wrapped feet on the snow. 

“I’ll bring you something,” Left Over told him, smiling. “What do you want?”

Scrap stared at him then dropped his eyes. “Cans,” he said, gesturing. His voice was a thin scrap of a thing too. “Empty cans.”

Left nodded. Brindle whispered something into their ear, but Zhe was too far to hear.

“Let them get ready, kids,” she said, and they scattered, back to stare up at the snow. Zhe wished she could be sure that she’d cleaned all the broken glass from the ground.

She accompanied Left Over to the door they used, not the main one back when this had been a place of business, a little side door. Left looked out the peephole first, checked automatically that their gun was in its proper place: they weren’t like Zhe, hadn’t needed to learn the ways of violence and guns as something new.

“Mind the mines,” Zhe said quietly, now that the kids couldn’t hear.

Left had the faintest trace of a smile on their scarred face. “They can’t get me,” they said. “I know the placement, every one.”

Much as Zhe knew each straggling herb she’d placed in her garden, patting it into the dirt herself.  
“Be safe,” was all she said.

Left met her eyes. Everything about Left was pale, greyed. They looked to fade into the world sometimes, but their eyes were never anything but terrifying. “They need me,” Left said, and then they were gone in a flutter of snow and coat.

Zhe stood at the open door a moment, looking out after them. Snow smoothed over the scars in the road. Across from her there was a lucky cat beckoning, set sideways in a window that was most of what was left of its building.

Left Over had talked frequently and with an intensity in their eyes of how important vigilance was, safety. Zhe stepped back from the door and pulled it shut, and locked it twice, thrice, one more time with the rusted bolt she had to drag into place.

Intensity was not a stranger to Left Over, not as much a stranger as the two of them had been at first, before necessity and the same hiding spot and the shared unspoken responsibility had drawn them together. Left … There was such a rage in them at times. It hung heavier than their tatty grey coat; as invisible and as inarguable as the radiation that hung over all of them, that sparked most especially in the heart of tigers and turned them sour. Tigers were called that for their camouflage. There was hardly any way, really, to tell them apart from normal people.

Zhe stood breathing and put a smile on her face before she went back.

Even with the snow, the ground had a heat to it, like the skin of someone sick with fever. Her herbs were not growing, but at least they were not dead. She patted at the ground over them, shifted it a little, knelt with her hands in the dirt and breathed. The air smelt not of dirt but of ozone.

Scrap crouched across from her, watching her work. Zhe gave him a smile, and he stared back, unmoving. She went back to working. The mint would do fine; mint managed most everywhere, and once it had got its roots in it was likely to take over. She was concerned about the basil, its browning leaves.

Brindle danced around, always in motion, now pushing at the dirt and now darting off towards the corridor, not going as far as the door, because they had told her not to. She was always like that, moving restlessly, tugging at her shorn head or pulling her shirts apart by worrying at them. Bundling little dolls out of the threads, and then burning them.

Left Over had wandered over to her when she did that, while Zhe was still staring, and said, “Good. But don’t burn things where people might see and shoot at the light. If you have to, cover them,” showing her how to hide the little dolls with her hands, then how to set them alight so they burned fastest. How to do it so they’d burn slowest, as one would a fuse. Stopping only when Zhe looked at them.

That was the kind of thing Left Over did. They never meant badly. 

There was a scraping, and Zhe stiffened like iron had crept into her spine and rusted there, went still listening with one hand clenched around forgotten basil: another scrape, screeching and awful. 

Someone was at the door.

Tigers were not fools, were like humans for the most part. Either this was a mad loner or a distraction for a main team. Zhe stood up unslinging her rifle.

Left Over could deal with this better; with their history, with their culpability. But Zhe was the one who was here.

She went to the corridor with her rifle, blocking the way to the children with her body, but there were more of them: three, eight, crowding in the doorway unsmiling, and not tigers at all but men, with the look that said they had been military when there was such a thing, the stiffness in their posture that Left fell into at times.

A childish voice raised in inquiry from back in the big room, and Zhe fell back. These men could shoot her and step over the corpse easily, proceeding on. Her best way to help was to try to keep things calm, and get the children out when she could, if she could.

Snow had stopped falling through the hollow skylight now, but it was more bitterly cold, pinching at her nose and biting at her lips. “Who’s here –” Brindle said and fell silent, her eyes on the soldiers following Zhe.

Zhe tried for bravery: “These men are just here to look around,” she said, which wouldn’t work on Brindle but might on Scrap. Too late for any of them to run. If she made a distraction … The thought of a stray bullet tearing into childflesh once guns began to be fired made her wince.

The group of looters fanned out around them. Zhe shepherded the children with her hands, trying to move them back, unsure what to say. _Stand behind me_ would not work when they were surrounded. She couldn’t protect them.

Before any of the soldiers could speak, before the leader could iterate beyond the sneer on his face, Left started firing at them from the roof, with their careful aim, a bullet to the head. Zhe dropped to the ground after the first shot, pulling the kids down with her. Bodies started dropping around the same time, more clumsily. She started to swear, under her breath and violently. For Left Over to do this, start a firefight when the children were here – what had the soldiers wanted? Unless Left wanted to take them out before any of them could identify Left. Hot sweat prickled down her back. Her arm was stretched out over Scrap, half-covering him, and he was still and quiet beneath it.  
After six shots, six kills, there was the briefest pause. During this Zhe glanced around at the dead men – no women here – and winced, wished she could spare more sympathy for them, wished she could feel anything but the worry that ate at her gut.

Clear in this moment of silence, the sound of many pairs of boots. Reinforcements.

Equally clear was Left Over saying a single, tense, “Fuck,” which gave her the maddest urge to laugh.  
She took this opportunity to try to scrabble away, but Scrap was still lying so, so still, and the two men still here – more were entering now, yells in their small corridor.

Left Over had reloaded. The soldier nearest to her fell, one eye still open and the other open fully wide and turned into a hole from the gunshot. Zhe, scrabbling, reached out to cover Brindle’s eyes, but the child shoved her away. She was staring, bright-eyed. Burning-eyed.

Tigers passed for people, nearly.

She took Zhe’s gun.

Zhe covered her head, covered Scrap’s eyes, stayed low and unmoving as the shouting and the shooting continued. It went on for a while, till it all merged even more in her head, like the repetitive beat of music the likes of which she hadn’t heard for a long time.

“I’m gonna plant things,” Scrap whispered.

Zhe rolled over with an effort. There was blood as well as sweat on her much-worn shirt. “Yes?” 

He nodded, as though she’d asked a real question or asked for confirmation, instead of making whichever noise came first to her dry lips. “In the cans,” he said, gesturing. His eyes were intent. She didn’t know if they held the same tigerlight, killing light, manic light, as Brindle’s did; wished she didn’t know in the case of either of them. “Gonna take your herbs and I’m going to plant them places, plant them all the places, so people can have green again.”

Zhe let out a long, rattling breath, and pushed her way up, bracing herself on the ground and getting up that way, slow but grit-teethed unrelenting. Out of the corner of her eye Left Over had calmed Brindle finally, Left’s coat shabby shapeless over their movements – crabbed-up, slower than usual, like they were wounded. They didn’t try to wrest the gun from her hand, but adjusted her grip, like tutoring, and, subtly, careful, nudged the nose so it pointed towards the ground. 

Zhe looked around. Many bodies littering the ground like broken glass. Her struggling little basil was crushed, ruinous. The mint was still fine.

Zhe breathed in the smell, not of dirt but of ozone and blood, that meant she was alive, and stood to get her gun back. She had a feeling she’d need it.


End file.
